CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Oct. 24, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Hadapt, creator of the first big data platform to integrate Hadoop with a structured data store to allow for high performance analytics across both structured and unstructured data, today announced that it has closed a $9.5 million Series A round of financing led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Bessemer Venture Partners. Matthew Howard, general partner at NVP, and Felda Hardymon, partner at Bessemer, have joined Hadapt's Board of Directors.

"Hadapt bridges the gap between Hadoop ‘big data' analytics technology and enterprise requirements for performance, reliability, and SQL compatibility," said Matthew Howard, general partner at Norwest Venture Partners. "The ability to seamlessly analyze both structured and unstructured data within a single system is an enormous pain point for enterprises, and Hadapt's technology is uniquely suited to solve this issue."

Enabled by patent-pending technology first developed as research under co-founder and Yale professor Dr. Daniel Abadi, Hadapt is the only analytical platform that natively integrates Apache Hadoop and advanced database technology. "Integrating the two technologies – Hadoop and parallel database systems – required a significant body of research into architectural considerations, new loading technologies, parallel processing, and even graph processing," said Professor Abadi, who also serves as Chief Scientist at Hadapt. "We are excited to add two top-tier venture capital partners and to continue growing our dedicated team of first-rate engineers in order to bring this technology into the market in a highly impactful way."

Many of the Big Data problems that enterprises face today involve the analysis of a complex mix of structured and unstructured data, but data silos and scalability issues abound. Hadapt's next-generation architecture allows companies to perform new kinds of analytical workloads across these diverse data sets by combining the scalability, fault-tolerance, and load-balancing of Hadoop with the native SQL support and high performance of a DBMS. With this capital investment, Hadapt plans to accelerate product development, scale operations, and expand market development for its software solution. In addition, the company is relocating to Cambridge in order to attract talent from the area's rich database community.

"Companies are looking for ways to glean actionable insights from the enormous amounts of multi-structured data that they generate," said Felda Hardymon, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. "Hadoop is a fantastic architecture for storing all of this data, but lacks the performance and functionality that enterprises expect from a traditional database system. Hadapt's high performance query processing framework opens up a new realm of big data analytics."

"We are excited to have Norwest Venture Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners as investors, and I welcome industry veterans Matt Howard and Felda Hardymon to our board of directors," said Hadapt CEO Justin Borgman. "This financing will allow us to aggressively pursue our product development goals as well as to continue building a base of satisfied early adopter customers."

In a separate news release today, Hadapt announced that the company has appointed former HP, Opsware, and Aster Data executive Sharmila Shahani-Mulligan to the Hadapt Board of Directors, and has hired former MarkLogic CEO and Business Objects SVP Dave Kellogg as an advisor.

About HadaptOriginating from research at the Yale computer science department, Hadapt delivers the only big data analytics platform that natively integrates Hadoop with advanced database technology, allowing for the analysis of sets of structured and unstructured data. For more information, visit www.hadapt.com.

About Norwest Venture PartnersNorwest Venture Partners (NVP) is a global venture capital firm that manages more than $3.7 billion in capital. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, NVP has subsidiaries in Mumbai and Bengaluru, India and Herzelia, Israel. NVP makes early to late stage venture and growth equity investments in U.S. and global companies across a wide range of sectors including: information technology, healthcare, business services, financial services, infrastructure, technology enabled services and consumer. NVP has actively partnered with entrepreneurs to build great businesses for more than 50 years and has funded nearly 500 companies since inception. For more information, visit www.nvp.com.

About Bessemer Venture PartnersBessemer Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices in Silicon Valley, Cambridge, Mass., New York, Mumbai and Herzliya, Israel. One of the oldest venture capital practices in the United States, BVP has partnered as an active, hands-on investor in Ciena, LinkedIn, Celtel, Blue Nile, Skype, Staples, VeriSign and Yelp. More than 100 BVP-funded companies have gone public on exchanges in Canada, India, the U.K. and the United States. Learn more at www.bvp.com and www.bvp.com/india.